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Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

Exactly one hundred years ago, the state government of Colorado and the Rockefeller owned CFI company, (Colorado Fuel and Iron), committed an atrocity against poor striking workers – even before the Great Slaughter of World War I. This terrible atrocity possessed the infamous name of the Ludlow Massacre.

What was amazing about this particular miners’ struggle was that they represented various nationalities and cultures: Eastern European, German, Greek, Mexican, Anglo-American, Irish, Italian, New Mexican, British, French and even a few African-Americans. This motley ethnic group had finally had enough with the mining system practiced in the state of Colorado at the turn of the century.

America’s business elites had badgered the federal government for a more ‘disciplined and compliant’ workforce, so the US state apparatus willingly allowed millions of immigrants to enter its borders. The mine owners preferred to hire the newly arrived immigrants due to their willingness to accept low wages and that they all spoke different languages. Unions had troubles organizing against the mine bosses. Those mine bosses also built company towns. Sometimes they literally took over a town with a pit mine in it, and later, transformed the village into a mining town.

In the mining towns, the mine workers and their families lived in shacks without the basic hygienic systems. They had to pay high rents, and buy their basic supplies from the company stores, meaning clothes, foodstuffs and the basic articles for survival. The company stores nickel and dimed the workers on shelf items, and the workers had to use worthless company scrip papers. Sometimes, the mine company paid the workers in those worthless papers, instead of the regular notes.

Workers had to inform the mine company guards when leaving or arriving. The mine company guards ran the towns like the prisons. These legal criminals even murdered or tortured the uncooperative and rebellious workers in the dead of the night. There was really nothing the miners could do, since the main mining outfits had monopolistic owners, such as the Rockefeller family. The Rockefeller’s 40 room villa was all the way on the other side of the continent anyway – Tarrytown, New York!

Mining was a very dangerous job. The mining schedule was a seven-day a week back and neck destroyer that went from sun up to sun down. Back then, accidents, explosions and mine disasters were quite common. Miners died through simple overwork, lung emphysema, suffocation-drowning through getting buried alive or due to flash flooding in the tunnels, or just having their bodies blown into various pieces due to sudden explosions. There was no compensation for any mining accident. A dead miner had to pay for his own burial, or the other miners just threw the dead weight into the common garbage ditch.

In Ludlow, the miners and their families created their own alternative town. They armed themselves with guns, set up a functioning mutual aid system at the campsite, squatted on the land, and the men wore ripped pants, overalls, caps on their heads, and red bandanas around their necks. This was the true origin of the term ‘redneck,’ yet in the current Amerikan Empire, racists and reactionaries have taken the class war term ‘redneck,’ as their own.

The state of Colorado and the Rockefeller monopoly counterattacked with allowing the company mine guards to join the Colorado State Militia. They too had guns – and cannons – and bombs. On April 20th, 1914 they fired upon the tent colony and burnt up the Ludlow miners-squatters camp, murdering around 20 people, most of whom were women and children.

This was not the end of the story. The men of the red bandanas moved the offensive into the Colorado hills. They killed mine guards, worker narc-snitches, and mine pit bosses. The actual number of killed company thugs is still unknown to this day. The miner-guerrillas were so successful in exterminating the mine managers and company town goons that Liberal Democrap, President Wilson sent into federal troops to intimidate the fighters.

Soon, the IWW solidarity union, or the Wobblies, joined with the miner-fighters, while the Rockefellers tried their hands at ‘company unions’ in order to squelch the mutual aid and solidarity networks. Eventually, the mine owners had to settle for union organization with the United Mine Workers. Now the miner job pays well, has some worker compensation packages, and there are less mine pit hours.

The miners had moved onto the war of offense because they had nothing else to lose. They had realized that they had become wage slaves.

Capitalism owes its evil birth from the rotting flesh of slavery. Capitalism and Slavery are historically intertwined like moss growing on an old stone building. We understand this history of Capitalism thanks to the nineteenth-century intellectual, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was however wrong about his general theories of history. Marx stated in his 1848 writings that all culture and history, called the ‘superstructure of society,’ came out of the ‘productive base of labor and work.’ This theory is incorrect. He was mistaken because he was a philosopher trying to become a historian. History is not a social science but an art of interpreting human struggles and violence. Like artists, humans simply create their own history, and make up their own culture.

Karl Marx was actually quite brilliant in describing the brutality of the capitalist system. Capitalism spreads like gangrene, and grows into monstrous monopolies, while it becomes ever more contradictory as it expands out into the farthest reaches of the planet. This tendency to overproduce, to over-control, and to over-extend leads into the contradictory world of class conflict over wage slavery.

Class conflict or class struggle is simply the continual and incessant changes coming from the owners-bosses in demanding more brutal work output from the workers. The owners want the workers to produce more and more until the poor laborers drop dead because the owners run the businesses for the sake of profit. ‘Profit’ comes from the French verb, ‘profiter,’ which implies, ‘to take advantage of someone.’

Yet the workers only want to work the least amount as possible, since they have to give up their lives, their time and their energy for a survival wage. This is the contradictory condition within all ‘businesses,’ both large and small, imprisoned inside the capitalist beast.

The worker or laborer transforms into the wage slave because he or she must have some income, or wage salary, in order to pay government taxes and rent-utility bills for shelter, and then pay for foodstuffs and clothes. Marx correctly surmised that all working people laboring for a wage have to then ‘sell themselves’ to the owners on the capitalist market. The owners hire managers or company commanders to hire out for them. The plantation boss used overseers to manage labor discipline. The wage slaves, like the slaves of ancient times, must willingly give up large portions of their personal time and strength in order to receive this survival wage or slave wage.

This particular labor-slave cycle continues until they are too old, badly injured, or simply worthless, within the general labor pool. Once they go, then the owner can easily find a younger and more compliant worker to replace the labor loss. When the slave never woke up from sleep or died while working, the plantation owner then visited the slave market for a replacement.

The company owner reviews the labor market through hiring managers that do the employment screening. It is the not the tyranny of useless money that eventually kills the spirit of the average worker-laborer-employee, rather it is the tyranny of the cruel labor market represented through a fetid pool of applicants.

The first capitalist systems in the late medieval period, such as Islamic culture and the Venetian Empire needed an easy and compliant labor source too. They used what all empires have used throughout history: the capture, kidnapping and slow murder of slaves. The Muslim caliphates raided the pagan coasts of East Africa and the Christian Balcans, while the Catholic Venetians raided Muslim and Orthodox Christian territories in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of North Africa. During the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, (1400s and 1500s), the newer Atlantic world empires of Spain and Portugal would also raid North Africa for a ready supply of slaves. Eventually they would both go deeper into the African continent.

The other Atlantic world empires followed them, such as the Dutch, (Netherlands), with France and Britain in the seventeenth-century, (1600s). Following the Brazilian Portuguese use of captured slaves from the Tupamori Nation, the Spanish soon became the leaders in the use of captured native slaves from the Mapuche Nation of central Chile, the Guarani Nation of Paraguay, and the Apache Nation in the Red Rocks, or ‘Colorado’ frontier of Nuevo Mejico, (New Mexico). In the 18th century, (1700s), the British Empire would even overtake both the French Empire and the Portuguese Empire in becoming world history’s greatest kidnapping-mass murder-slave trade potentate from Africa to Asia to the Americas.

This imperial political-economic system transformed into Mercantile capitalism. The royal state with favored investors, usually aristocrat-noble relations or court favorites, controlled joint stock companies and the profits of final sale. Meanwhile, the slave planters had to bear numerous credit-debts through purchasing slaves and dealing with cash crop fluctuations in the market, such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, tea, opium and cotton.

Due to this capitalistic ‘mercantile’ monopoly, a new group of outlaws emerged in order to take fast money and loot for themselves, commonly called back then, ‘pirates.’ But for the West Indian ‘white’ planters, slaves were an excellent resource because they could also resale such movable capital. In the case of the Africans, they were the victims of kidnapping slave traders in Africa, and they had no legal resources. They were socially dead human waste.

Britain was also notorious for using just as many ‘white slaves,’ as their ‘black or African ones.’ The white slaves were often the victims of kidnapping rings found all over England and occupied Ireland. When the white slaves began to fraternize with the African ones, then African slavery began to have more ominous, permanent tones.

Britain’s world-wide kidnapping-slave-mass murder system was so successful that it freed up a special commandeering class of scientists, inventors and investors to fund and experiment in technological advancement. It is no coincidence that during this same eighteenth-century, Industrial Capitalism came into fruition.

But the old system of plantation agriculture slavery in the American colonial-settler states, with its numerous inefficiencies and ugly brutality – had to go. Industrial capitalism valued the factory system, which produced a lot more, and hid its brutalities under smoke stacks and within inferno like worker dungeons. A new slave economy was necessary.

Instead of the owners paying for the worker-slaves’ crap food and flea infested huts, they could pay the losers a ‘wage.’ Now, the lowlifes had to pay their own way through life – and literally beg for a ‘job.’ They were technically free – but like any slave, they permanently lost their honor and dignity.

We have returned full circle to the slave trade of Ludlow. These terrible relations between capitalism and slavery still breathe their noxious fumes as I write.

Now capitalism functions under even greater duress, and its contradictions are so much more intense due to the actual extremes of global monopoly capitalism. Even the technically skilled or PhDs, such as myself, have to suffer under the indignity of permanent unemployment or underemployment. Billions of us currently experience life as capitalism’s victims. Even if we don’t work for ‘The Man,’ we still slave under the mental guilt of not having any good employment prospects. Unless we have family money to support us, we must continually resell ourselves on the slave labor market for survival.

If we really own property, which means no mortgage debts or property taxes whatsoever, then we are all technically homeless. We give dirty stares to the pathetic ‘home bums,’ or permanently homeless, on the street corners; yet, their numbers will only continue to grow. Some of us reading this essay, will also end our lives down there – dying slowly in the hopeless gutter.

For the rest of us that are ‘lucky to have work,’ our ‘freedom’ comes at a terrible price. A good chunk of our time and our lives goes to the owner’s personal profit margin, while our general quality of life suffers. We also live impaired under the political-cultural ideology of global monopoly capitalism, called Neo-Liberalism. Most of us live in overcrowded and unhealthy cities, where most of our ‘wage money’ goes into a toilet drain of rent housing.

In order to live economically, many of us have to consume crappy genetically modified food. Meanwhile, both our minds and stomachs have to tolerate regular scam artistry, ubiquitous, large public signs that warn and threaten with the smoldering potential of violent street crime. All of us must endure the institutional violence of petty felony laws, common deceitfulness between neighbors, continual advertising overload, and pathological lying from politicians. Like the old saying goes, ‘slavery has never ended.’

January 27, 1889 was the date of decision. The day started out quite nice and sunny for a rough winter in that beautiful, modernized city of Paris. Construction workers had almost completed the stunning Eiffel Tower for the upcoming Worlds Fair in October. Many French people thought there was a confidence in the air. France recently suffered terrible losses to Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, and then there was the Commune Civil War that followed in 1871.

About twenty years earlier, the late dictator, Napoleon III, had commissioned an architect to demolish most of the medieval winding streets that had made Paris so romantic. The city still had its charms though, even with its wide boulevards that could march whole armies to better exterminate recalcitrant revolutionaries. This urban project was the first successful modern gentrification undertaking. Also around this time, French artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals had become world-famous through producing works that displayed the modern trends of Impressionism, Realism and Symbolism.

But there was another rumbling in the air that day. A French general by the name of General Boulanger had become the talk of the nation. This great and honorable man seemed to have fortune on his side. He was ready to retake his beloved France with the movement that supported him to power. This opportune winter moment was the day for his sunny ‘coup d’état.’

That French term meant that this military adventurer and strongman had to seize the day, take over the state, become a new Caesar, dictator – and even a tyrant. General Boulanger won the election to the French Parliament, La Chambre des députés, but he couldn’t bear to sit among the corrupt deputies that most French citizens hated. His ‘political movement’ wanted him to declare himself President, lead the French Army to disband the corrupt Congress and win back territories that the Second German Empire, or Second Reich, had seized during the last war.

The corrupt French press could not resist him, and they transformed the general into a greater than life, ‘Hero of the Nation.’ But there was more to the man than his press persona. The political mobilization that supported him was the real power behind such a figure. A bizarre political cabal had already mobilized angry French citizens, mostly conservative ones, who saw their country turn into something they hated. The French Third Republic was quite corrupt and the ideals of French Revolution seemed to matter little to the ambitious band of politicians in Paris.

A movement coalesced between old Monarchists, (Boulanger even spoke to Napoleon’s exiled family living in Switzerland), devout Catholics, and militarists who wanted to see France avenge its humiliating defeat against Germany, and possibly even – defeat the great British Empire and complete Napoleon’s sacred dream of the ‘L’empire français universel.’

The Boulanger political deployment started off as a propaganda agitation campaign. It next moved into a street mode of action, and then resorted to selective violence against its political enemies. Now they had their symbol personified in a dignified general that showed his public face against the corrupt republic.

The problem with this social movement was that it did not represent the whole of the country. Courageous French intellectuals began to expose the shaded groups behind the Man, and especially the political alliances in the shadows that hated the ideals of the French Revolution, which most of the French population did still support.

With the exposures against him, General Boulanger got scared, lost his honor and courage, and he flaked out with his coup d’état. The scheming plotter in the costume of a French general would eventually kill himself just two years later. This political moment in French History became the Boulanger Affair. It represented the first modern populist-social movement of France. This movement attempted to destroy the country in order to save it.

Populist-fascist social movements are the most powerful hegemonic political blocks in modern democratic countries. They emerge when the entire democratic system begins to rot from the inside. Corruption becomes rampant, the legislature transforms into paid off hacks, and the government turns into another tyrannical regime. Anger increases substantially through the citizenry, and especially among the male population. The term populism signifies a political movement geared for a large section of the people, or the ‘nation.’

Populist-fascist movements grab their power through unifying angry elite institutions with angry social movements, most often religious ones. Religious social movements work wonderfully because they have the best social meeting spaces: churches, mosques, synagogues and temples. Through uniting powerful people with powerful social movements, the populist-fascist social movements transcend into optimum political forces or complete counter-hegemonic blocks against the state – while making alliances with other scheming sections of the state. These contradictions are not apparent among the street level activists.

Once the populist-social alliances increase their organizing into mobilizations, they move powerfully into the political field, through both agitation and violence. They ultimately hope to seize the state in order to murder their enemies. They lost in 1880s in France, but they almost won about a hundred years later in the United States.

America in the mid 1980s and into the 90s was a volatile place. Right-wing intellectuals have often talked about that time in history as a type of ‘restoration’ under President Reagan – but it was anything like that. What really happened was that elements of the Republican Party, implying certain members of the old guard that surrounded Nixon, the disgraced former president, decided to form a powerful political alliance, or a new hegemonic block. This block would emerge as a powerful force in dividing the Democratic party electorate, which allowed that party to control the US Congress for over twenty years.

First, they forged an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, which had about a quarter of the US population. The Catholic Church was always the strange Christian group looking on the outside compared to the standard Mainline Protestant Churches of America, such as the Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians. But now they had a substantial part of the population, (about one quarter), and with special thanks to President Reagan allowing a Vatican ambassador to D.C. and signing the Immigration Reform Act into law – the first dice was cast.

Later, right-wing activists helped this base achieve even greater mobilization and power. The conservative activists in the Catholic Church set up the Moral Majority Organization using a Baptist political-preacher, (from the South), as a front man, named Jerry Falwell. Catholic conservatives would use this same strategy through mobilizing other single issue front group-crusades, such as fighting against the separation between Church and State, anti-homosexuality, anti-pornography, anti-teenage rebellion, anti-illegal drugs, anti-sex education, exposing Satanism in rock music and popular culture, and most importantly, anti-abortion.

Those particular political mobilizations proceeded into the street agitations. The single issue that could unite them was abortion. Phony anti-abortion evangelists, or disguised Catholic preachers, entered the parachurch world of Evangelicals that met in rented spaces, such as movie theaters, Mainline Protestant churches and even inside Masonic halls! These religious movements represented the Charismatic types that ‘spoke in tongues,’ or unintelligible gibberish, fell on the floor through being ‘slain in the spirit’; while selected parishioners blurted out prophetic statements during the worship, and the church goers danced sexually to Christian musicians playing a type of repetitive soft rock beat with militarized church lyrics, such as ‘Army, marching, warfare, battle, victory, etc.’

These disguised abortion preachers even entered the sacred Protestant spaces of Southern Baptist churches. For the first time in its religious history, the Roman Catholic Church forged a strong political alliance with its most hated rivals – the heretics, under the common single issue of abortion. History has always been so absurd.

The anti-abortion evangelists successfully mobilized these hurting people, or ‘heretics,’ into joining the crusade against abortion in America. In the beginning of the crusade, the main groups against abortion in America were political committees formed through the US Catholic Bishop’s Conference.

Suddenly, a populist-fascist social movement had conceived its nativity on the American political scene. Even former pro-choice Republicans, such as the Reagan successor, President Bush, joined the crusade. All of a sudden, angry activists were attacking, confronting and surrounding women’s health centers across the States, and then in the early 90s, the movement resorted to the common tactics of religious fanatics through murdering doctors and health providers across the country. A homegrown political terrorist net birthed, but America’s political police, the FBI, refused to take down the movement. A certain element of America’s political and intelligence elites had a big stake in the anti-abortion assemblage.

But the six laws of history had to come into play, and the Roman Catholic Church failed to understand the cultural blocks that had formed within the United States up to that time. American women had already achieved substantial power in society through fighting two previous waves of feminist agitation. Many American women had already attained important career and lifestyle choices in their lives, and they were not going to give up their hard-won privileges due to some anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-contraception religious fanatics.

America’s Women organizations countered the movement through fully allying with the Democratic party and mobilizing, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of citizens to annually march on D.C., something the anti-abortionists could not do. Some political elites in Washington stood aghast. Their sick plans of ‘national salvation and resurgence’ met a strong political counterforce.

The Republican Party countered with their Convention of 1992, which featured speeches of selected religious fanatics and fascists in order to scare the opposition. It did just the opposite. They looked quite bad on TV. The conservative Southern Democrat, Clinton, seized on the scare and placed himself into the political center. He won the presidency and all of a sudden, the federal government changed its tolerant policy with the populist-fascists, while they began to hunt the most extreme terrorists inside of the anti-abortion crusade.

The populist-fascist crusaders attacked President Clinton mercilessly through the press. But the president was also an expert killer like the ones that preceded him. He had the US government exterminate the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco as a warning and a lesson to the defiant holdouts in the Movement. It worked.

Abortion stayed legal in the US, even with a Supreme Court that had a Catholic majority. The Mormons decided to bolt from the anti-abortion alliance and leave it to the Catholic Church and the rattled Evangelicals. And then ‘Mala Fortuna,’ or Bad Fortune, stabbed the Catholic Church in the foot. Media headlines exposed to the public that the Catholic Church had protected pedophile priests and perverts within its ranks. The public exposure of such crimes permanently damaged the reputation of the Catholic Church in American culture. The Roman Catholic Church would never be able to return to its short glory that it possessed during the 80s and 90s.

The mobilization did work in intimidating many doctors from performing abortions. Now, it is difficult to find abortion providers in many parts of the States. But there also exists the abortion pill that does not require surgical procedures.

This anti-abortion movement has kept up the protests, but it could not seize the state in order to complete its extermination of the ‘evil ones.’ It achieved a stalemate. A hundred years earlier in France, it lost.

In Spain however, during the 1930s, it won. The Spanish populist-fascist movement won because it had the backing of foreign intervention: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the secret support of the British and American governments.

For us Anarchists, this modern political story can help us recognize the political environments that encourage these movements, how they mobilize, and how we can ultimately help destroy them.

Populist-fascist social movements lose when a more powerful alliance of institutions and the people reject their plans. They stalemate or tie when they meet equally powerful social-cultural-political mobilizations. They win when they have the outside support of powerful foreign governments.